The Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society (MSOM) promotes the enhancement and dissemination of knowledge, and the efficiency of industrial practice, related to the operations function in manufacturing and service enterprises.

As the president of the MSOM Society, I am looking forward to introducing you to our newest member benefit, a MSOM Community within INFORMS Connect. We will soon be transitioning the MSOM listserv from its existing software platform to a new and improved community platform: INFORMS Connect (http://connect.informs.org). As an existing MSOM member, your subscription has been automatically migrated to the Community page within INFORMS Connect. If you are not currently a paid member of MSOM, you will lose access to this content, as it is considered a member benefit. Don’t miss out – join now!

Here’s a quick overview of some of the new features you can expect in INFORMS Connect:

Enhanced discussion capabilities. Now you’ll receive emails that are more structured and easier to read than a traditional listserv or forum alert, and will include a repository of all archived discussions. No more searching through email!

Improved Member Directory search. You can find members by name, location, SIG affiliation, area of expertise, work setting, and more.

Granular privacy controls. You can have complete control over what information you share with members of the community and your contacts.

Centralized subscription management. You can manage your subscriptions to all discussions in one place. Choose to receive daily digests or real-time emails by group.

Resource sharing. All attachments posted to discussions are archived in a dedicated MSOM Library. You can also add or download documents from the library.

You will receive a final notification when the transition has been completed. At that time, this list will be deactivated. I look forward to connecting with you!

The Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM) society will hold its annual conference on Monday, June 29 and Tuesday June 30, 2015 at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The MSOM Conference will be preceded by the MSOM Special Interest Group (SIG) Conferences on Sunday, June 28. We invite anyone interested in presenting a paper at the MSOM Conference to submit an extended abstract.

Abstracts should not exceed three (3) pages double-spaced, in Times New Roman, font size 12, and can be submitted in Word or .pdf format. No math symbols should be used and tables and diagrams should be minimal.

Abstracts will be selected for oral presentation by blind review, meaning no authors’ names or affiliations should appear on the abstracts. However, special consideration will be given by the conference committee to papers to be presented by faculty members. This consideration is based on the survey of the society conducted this past fall. For the benefit of all, if you indicate a faculty member will present, we hope this will be the case. Following MSOM policy, every abstract submitted will be automatically accepted into a poster session if not accepted for oral presentation. Acceptance of a paper for oral or poster presentation is conditional on at least one author registering for the conference.

Submission will be open from January 5, 2015 until March 9, 2015. No papers will be accepted after the March 9th deadline.

Please note that submission requirements for the MSOM Conference differ from the SIG submission requirements; papers submitted for SIG consideration should be sent to the specific SIG following their call for papers.

Linwei Xin, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, “Optimality Gap of Constant-Order Policies Decays Exponentially in the Lead Time for Lost Sales Models”

The finalists were selected out of a pool of 105 submissions based on the input from a large panel of experienced judges. Many judges commented on the excellence of the papers this year, which made it a difficult task to select the finalists.

We will announce the winners — first and second place — at the M&SOM Business Meeting (INFORMS, San Francisco), on Sunday November 9th at 6:15pm. Please check the conference program to find the exact location of the business meeting. We invite the M&SOM community at large to attend.

In addition, each finalist will present his/her work in one of two special M&SOM sessions scheduled for Monday 11/10/14, 1:30-3:00pm, and 4:30-6:00pm. We will follow up with additional information about these sessions later. We hope you will be able to attend these sessions!

This blog is a new initiative to be launched in 2015. Please stay tuned.

The motivation of this new online initiative is due to the fact that M&SOM Journal articles are written for OM researchers primarily. Consequently, non-OM researchers are often unable to see through the thicket of technical analysis; unable to appreciate the relevance of various M&SOM articles; and unable to apply the research findings of many M&SOM articles that could influence research in other fields or OM practice. To make M&SOM articles more accessible, authors of recently published M&SOM papers will be invited to distill the essence of their respective articles into short articles (say, 1000-1500 words) without any technical jargon or analysis, published here. The writing style of MSOM-Review articles should be similar to those articles published in Wall Street Journal, the Economist (“Leaders” section), the Guardian Professional (http://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional), etc. To increase the citation count of M&SOM articles and to promote these authors, each MSOM-Review article should refer to the original M&SOM article.

We hope that MSOM-Review can create a more vibrant OM community that engages academics, practitioners, and graduate students. Through this kind of interaction, our OM research community can learn more about issues arising from practice and the practitioners can benefit from our academic research.

This blog is a new initiative to be launched in 2015. Please stay tuned.

It is finally here! Going forward, M&SOM blog will the forum for disseminating research, teaching and for general outreach to the society members and beyond. Time will show how the blog evolves, but at the very least we see it serving the following purposes:

1. As a platform for M&SOM Board to update Society members on what is happening in the Society. While we reach out to the society from time to time through M&SOM mailing list, there is no simple way to access older posts.

2. As a supplement for M&SOM Journal. We envision that the authors of work that appears in M&SOM would in parallel write a short, accessible article explaining key findings to wider audiences.

3. As a forum for M&SOM Society members to offer their views and takes on the discipline, including discussion of promising research and teaching approaches. Although we do have OM Forum articles in M&SOM Journal, shorter/simpler articles would be better published as blogs.

Welcome to M&SOM blog and please feel free to offer your views on what would be great to have here!